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Powers Info
This page is here so that we can all be on the same page about how superpowers work in general. This is based mainly on stuff Cammy and Fawe thought up, with a few things that the GM of the original Classmates RP came up with. It was designed to be descriptive, not prescriptive; everything here is based on the principle of accounting for predictable IC patterns that already existed. Heritance/Genetics There's one gene that codes for whether a person has powers: it's recessive, because that fit with the existing facts that norms could have meta children and metas' children basically always have superpowers of their own. (If this gene were dominant instead, then only metas could spawn metas and their kids wouldn't be guaranteed to have powers.) There have been one or two player characters who have no powers despite having two powered parents; this is because one of their copies of the power gene is mutated and doesn't function. For norms, whether you're a carrier or not doesn't affect you at all; the gene still does nothing if you only have one of it. The only difference is whether you can have superpowered children.¹ There's also a separate collection of genes that control what your powers are (or would be). Everyone has these. The fact that everyone has genes determining their powers is why people who don't have the meta gene (that is, the one that switches powers on or off) can acquire superpowers in various types of freak accidents and then pass the same powers on to their children, although they have to have started out as a carrier in order to have meta children at all. Nobody's bothered to define the in-universe factors that determine precisely what powers the child gets from their parents' genes combining, because we're pretty sure there's no possible explanation that wouldn't bore or confuse non-genetics-geeks and that would be as versatile as leaving it unexplained. Usually, the kid has a power that's similar to one or both parents' powers, but it's not uncommon for them to get exactly the same power as one of their parents. It is rare for them to have copies of both parents' powers; that's only happened once among the PCs. (Well, twice, technically. Identical twins.) Genetically identical twins or clones will have exactly the same powers, so what power you get is determined entirely by your genes. It has no connection to environmental factors or chance. The exception to the last paragraph is the "random power gene", which does exactly what it sounds like: a meta with that gene will have a randomly generated power (from an IC perspective -- OOCly it's chosen normally) that has no connection to the powers their family members have. In fact, it can't have a connection to their family's powers, except by sheer coincidence. This is the only time when genetically identical twins can have different powers, and a clone of someone with the random power gene will have a completely different power (except if they're more of a superscience-photocopy than a realistic clone, like the Space Needle clones). The children of a meta with the random power gene cannot have powers that derive from the power their random-powered parent exhibits; their powers will be either equally random and unconnected if they inherited the random power gene, or derived from the other parent if they didn't. However, not every case of a child with a power unrelated to those of their biological parents and siblings is the random power gene at work; sometimes their power just skipped a generation or two. There have been a couple of bloodlines with a family power that's guaranteed to be inherited, running on various rules within the families. For the Kents, everyone has the same two powers, plus a third power that runs on similar but not quite identical rules to the random power gene. For the Lawrences, every firstborn daughter has the same power. For the Sparkses, there will always (well, more or less always -- there are gaps) be one girl with the same power, after her death another one will be born the next time a close relative conceives, and if you try to bring a second person with the same power into existence then the power rejects and leaves the newcomer without a power (and possibly without eyesight, given Hannah's case). Speaking of freak accidents: The overwhelming majority of superpowered individuals have powers because they have two copies of the power gene. However, there's a small number of people who instead got their powers from some kind of freak accident. In general, though, coming into contact with random chemicals or radioactive waste or mysterious radiation will just kill you, not give you superpowers. The odds of you surviving and getting superpowers are at least as slim as the odds of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning, possibly even more unlikely. Due to a little bit of genetic tampering by the superscientist who created them, the Space Needle clones have a slightly different version of the on/off switch gene: namely, a dominant one. It does the exact same thing as the usual version, but only one copy of it has to be passed on for their children to have superpowers, and each of the clones has two copies of the dominant version so all their kids will have it. (If one parent is a clone and the other isn't, the kid will have one dominant meta allele, and either one recessive meta allele or one non-meta allele depending on the circumstances. If both parents are clones then their kid is the same as a clone for genetic purposes. This means that the earliest point when a clone descendant could be born without the tweaked gene is the third generation.) The on/off switch gene controls whether your body produces a (fictional, obviously) protein known as metaglucodrate, which is what makes it possible to do supernatural stuff. Diseases and devices that nullify powers, or prevent them from being used, work by interfering with the metaglucodrate (the fact that powers can be turned off instantaneously with a nullifying device should probably be attributed to supernatural effects, because I can't think of any biological mechanism that would make that possible). The concentration of metaglucodrate in your body controls how strong your powers are (this doesn't seem to have an upper limit), and things that intensify or decrease the strength of your powers work by messing with metaglucodrate levels. Normally those levels are static in the short term, but they do tend to go up somewhat over time from either frequent power usage or just growing into your powers. (Or both.) However, it is possible for them to spike as the result of intense emotion; this temporary boost in power level was noted ICly back in T2G. It's also possible to make someone who's usually a norm produce metaglucodrate temporarily; the power-nullifying cold has an opposite number that does exactly that. Having said that, it's extremely difficult to synthesize metaglucodrate in a lab or extract it from the body in a usable form even with superscience, so at present there are no drugs that give norms superpowers. It's probably possible for a norm to develop weak, temporary powers if they get a blood transfusion that came from a meta, though. (They wouldn't have the same powers as the donor, of course; they'd have their own powers.) At least, this would be possible if the protein can survive that long outside of a person without breaking down; this hasn't really been established. Powers Are Freakin' Magic They basically are magic. Powers are able to defy the laws of nature in whatever ways the author wants, which isn't just limited to breaking the laws of physics. Powers-in-the-abstract are treated as an inscrutable force that can bring about things like making sure there's only one copy of a given power around at a particular time, which isn't really possible if genetic happenstance is the only factor involved. Powers in the abstract are a stand-in for magic but Cammy gets cranky if you actually call them magic and making a character whose power is "casting magic spells" will make pretty much everyone cranky. "It's because of powers" is an acceptable handwave for minor plot-convenient divergences from reality if used with care; this excuse is not for use as a complete deus ex machina. The authors are also content with having no explanation for where the energy to power superpowers comes from, because some of them wouldn't be happy with any potential explanation and even the ones who wouldn't mind one probably wouldn't be able to agree on which to use. The General Population Reflects The PC Population For simplicity's sake², it's assumed that most aspects of the PC population reflect the demographics of the overall metahuman population. (Age is one of the few exceptions. The RP revolves around school-age characters but metas have existed since the dawn of humanity, so it's not like the majority of metas in the world are between the ages of 13 and 23.) This basically amounts to two things: metas who have some flaw that would make them unplayable or significantly less appealing as a PC are extremely rare, and the distribution of what powers people have is similar to how it is among the PCs. Distribution of Power Types Like I just said, the distribution of general categories of powers among metahumans in general is basically the same as with the PCs. (If you're reading this while you're planning to make a new PC, don't feel constrained by what kinds are the most common. These are statistics, not rules or even guidelines. It is okay to give your character an uncommon-but-not-unusual power, we just don't want everyone jumping on the same uncommon or rare power at once.) * Shapeshifting is the most common category of power. It covers turning into one animal (this includes fictional animals like dragons), turning into various animals, turning into other humanoid forms, turning into something less solid than your normal shape, becoming much smaller or much larger at will, being able to make yourself substantially older or younger as desired, and just being an amorphous, homogenous blob-person who can rearrange their body at will. (Plenty of shapeshifter characters have a power that allows them to do more than one of these things. That's nothing out of the ordinary.) * Elemental powers are also very common, but not quite as varied. There are a lot of characters who can manipulate fire, water, ice/coldness, electricity, darkness/shadows, etcetera with their minds alone. A lot of powers that don't include the ability to manipulate an element are tied to it in a different way. * Psychic powers are common, but, like shapeshifting, this is a broad category; it includes all types of extrasensory perception (telepathy, empathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, etc etc etc) as well as telekinesis and mind-manipulation powers. * Stopped or drastically slowed aging is somewhat uncommon as a standalone power, but shows up fairly often as a handy side effect of having another power, and is thus at least semi-common overall. It's likely to be included with a power that allows you to come back from the dead, although this is not guaranteed. Immunity to old age often shows up as a bonus of having a comprehensive healing factor that protects against degeneration from age, or sometimes for shapeshifters if their default form is fluid or their power resets their body every time they turn back into their usual shape. There's also ways to do it indirectly; superscience provides a number of routes to that goal, and the ability to move or copy your mind to a fresh body (whether it's cloned, supernaturally generated, supernaturally animated, robotic, stolen from someone else...) also makes it possible to live for as long as you can keep doing that. Constructs are somewhat more likely than regular metas to be ageless, but that's mostly because the category includes living dolls and robots and so forth. * Superstrength is actually fairly uncommon, unlike most universes with superpowers, on the basis that only ten-ish characters who've appeared on-screen, out of a cast of probably more than a hundred characters counting all three generations, have that power. It does tend to appear in conjunction with superhuman durability, but usually doesn't come as a package deal with flight. Also, most superstrong characters have mild to medium superstrength rather than being on par with Superman and his many many knockoffs, although there's been one or two who are strong enough to seriously consider arm-wrestling Superman. * Speaking of flight, it's pretty uncommon too, even more atypical for a super-verse. It's more common than superstrength, though; there's more characters with the power of telekinetic levitation, having wings, being able to ignore gravity, or blowing oneself around by manipulating the wind than there are who have superstrength. (This doesn't count gadgeteers who build jetpacks and similar flying machines.) I'd estimate that it's maybe half again as common as superstrength. * Superspeed is a bit more common than superstrength, but still fairly uncommon. There are a couple of characters who're both super-strong and super-fast but usually the powers don't occur together, also similar to flight. * The most common exception to the general trend of superhuman speed, durability, and strength not appearing together is when the meta gains those abilities by being or turning into some kind of obviously non-human creature (often a big hairy beast) that's about as strong, fast, and well-armored as, for instance, a grizzly bear. Superior to humans, but not exactly unusual for a large predatory animal. * The various superscience-gadgeteering powers -- mad science powers, control over technology, and/or certain varieties of superintelligence -- are uncommon running to rare, but common enough to be a recognised power-category. The characters seem to be divided on whether "mad scientist" refers to the power alone or if you have to be crazy for the term to apply; "superscientist" is more straightforward, and "science powers" has also become popular with the authors. Depending on whether you count the Josses and the Henrys (well, Henry and Archie; if you include all of Henry's clones of himself it's just nuts) separately, there's been either six or nine mad scientist PCs at the time of writing. * The ability to alter other people's physical sex is surprisingly common for such a niche power. It's still pretty rare in an absolute sense though. * People with the ability to nullify powers are rare but common enough to be a widely recognised type of power rather than it being treated like a one-of-a-kind thing. There have been about four of them among the PCs. Powers that modify other powers (you could call them meta-meta-powers, if you wanted to be kind of annoying) in other ways are about as common when grouped together as nullifiers are by themselves. * Healing powers are remarkably rare. We've had maybe four, total, and have two in T3G. (Estimated; I may have forgotten about someone but I rounded up.) It has been noted OOCly that making healing powers common and readily available -- and this also goes for healing artifacts made with a different power, like superscience devices or videogame-style healing potions -- forces authors to up the lethality of their villains, which we'd rather avoid, so healing powers should stay rare. * Some powers are rare because the players don't like dealing with them. Complete invulnerability as opposed to just being very tough is rare because it means the character can never lose a physical fight; accurate precognition is rare because it either forces specific events to happen later on (which could easily become godmoding if other authors' characters are part of the prophecy or would have wanted to stop/change the events that were foretold) or turns out to be wrong and creates a plot hole; mind control and similar ("and similar" covering things like emotion control) is rare because a large percentage of the players hate the idea of another player having that much control over their character. However, there have been characters with these powers anyway, except the precognition (although there was a NPC precog); they aren't banned/nonexistent, just avoided/rare. They need to be handled with care but they aren't forbidden outright. There are, however, a few powers that are rare among PCs and even rarer in the general population, either because a player requested that things be that way or because they're very powerful abilities that have the potential to cause massive chaos if even 1% of the overall meta population had them. That's about 0.1% of the general population, which may not sound like much, but amounts to several million people spread across the world. * The specific ability to see, hear, and commune with ghosts is rare and confined to one bloodline. Recently it's been shown that only one person with this power can even exist at a time, to the point of stripping it from a clone of someone who originally bore the power and had been replaced as the medium by the time of her creation, but there was a plot in early T2G that revolved around its villain having the ghost power simultaneously with a PC. (He was retconned into a weak-blooded offshoot descendant of the Sparks family, as well.) Powers that include the capacity to perceive ghosts, but aren't built around being a medium for them, exist but should be hashed out with Fawe. * Reality warpers are rare and a common limitation on the ones that do exist is that they can only affect their immediate surroundings/what they can see. This is because... y'know, they warp reality. It's about as close to a blank check as a superpower can get. However, the majority of reality warpers do have their powers top out somewhere sane even if they don't have the specific limitations I just mentioned; Wes is an extreme outlier who just gets a lot of attention, not a typical-for-the-setting example of a reality warper. * Time travel is one of the rarest powers out there, because the ability to change the past would massively screw up continuity if an unwise or untrustworthy author had it, and also time paradoxes are a headache nobody wants to deal with. Travelling to the near future has the same OOC hazards as precognition. Number of Powers Per Person The majority of metas only have one power, with two powers being the minority but pretty common as well, three powers being uncommon but by no means unheard of, and it's extremely rare (possible, but very rare indeed) for anyone to have more than three or maybe four. This has no connection to how powerful, combat-useful, or broad the power in question is, although plenty of powers aren't very clearly delineated and it's ambiguous whether they're actually one power or a collection of multiple closely related powers. And the power count doesn't include little things thrown in as a special effect that don't do enough to count as a power in their own right. The difficulty defining what counts as one discrete power is probably why nobody really cares, ICly, about the number of powers an individual meta has. What Metas Look Like Metas are usually good-looking (whether they're conventionally or unconventionally attractive) and thin to average in size, as detailed in the next section. Red hair is more common for metas than for norms due to quirks of genetics, but it's still pretty rare objectively, just less rare than among norms. This is similar to how Irish and Scottish people are more likely to have red hair but it's not like it's the most common hair colour in those countries. Race is one area that does depart significantly from the "the general population reflects the PC population" thing: even though most PCs are white or East Asian, metas are found in roughly equal proportions among basically all ethnic groups. (The exception being populations that grew from a relatively small gene pool and mostly bred with each other, like, for example, the Amish. That kind of genetically bottlenecked group might in fact have significantly more or fewer metas than the average.) Metas are able to have natural hair and eye colors that are either impossible or extremely unusual (like white hair on a young non-albino) for norms, like pink hair or red eyes. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the specific powers that they have, but norms can't have weird natural hair and eye colors except in very, very rare cases (there's been exactly one red-eyed norm NPC in the RP). Sometimes being subjected to a power nullifier will make the character's eyes change colour to something normal and their hair grow in as whatever normal colour makes the most sense for their genetics, for the time that the character's under the nullifying effect. This isn't consistent, though; it may or may not happen depending on the nature of the nullifying effect. There are also metas who have more exotic unnatural features, like multicolored hair, dead filmy eyes that don't interfere with their vision, or hair that naturally assumes a style that would normally require heavy styling (like the Ragworts' spider-leg hair). Certain metahuman bloodlines have a tight link between some distinctive physical feature (eye color is the most common) and a particular power, above and beyond just having both traits run in the family; a character who has the power is almost guaranteed to have the feature, although it doesn't always work the other way around (you can have the feature and not the power, in other words) even for family members. For example, the Ragworts' fear powers are linked to red eyes and spider-leg hair, the Tennenbaums' immortality powers are linked to pale blue eyes, and the Heffrons' plant elemental powers are linked to blond-streaked green hair (as well as the power of photosynthesis). However, if the feature is a particular eye or hair color rather than something more unique (the aforementioned spider-leg hair is a good example of "something more unique"), it will show up outside the family on people with totally unrelated powers, because no one can have a monopoly on a colour of eyes or hair or something that's equally generic from an OOC perspective. The Metahuman Population Metahumans are a minority; they make up no more than 10% of the global population. However, the RP is set in places where they're extremely common; the town of Redford was mainly populated by students and alumni of a famous school for metahumans, and the city of Seattle is the metahuman capital of the United States and also contains the main West Coast meta school. This is the IC reason why like 90% of the player characters have powers despite the whole "minority" thing. Incidentally, the city with the second biggest meta population per capita in the US is New York City. Because New York is weird. (Similar "because it's already weird" reasoning might mean there are a lot of metas in Austin, Miami, Portland, San Francisco, and any other weird US cities I might have missed. This has not been explored, but if it smells like a worldbuilding hook to you, go for it.) Large concentrations of metahumans attract weirdness. This is partly just how the universe is, and partly because superpowers enable weird situations that wouldn't otherwise be possible (which includes most of the things villains do). Henry has noticed this ICly and frequently mentions having written a paper on it. It's been indicated IC (via scientific observations in the present and glimpses of the future) that the metahuman population is increasing and eventually everyone will have superpowers. This was decided to be because powers, aside from being attractive/impressive in their own right (well, a lot of them are -- some of them make your life suck, are decidedly unimpressive, freak people out, or balance the good stuff with massive gaping flaws), tend to occur alongside other appealing traits; see the following paragraph. This has been attributed to metas getting the best mates in prehistoric times, before the undefined point when they decided to hide their existence from the norms. However, a much more important contributor to the future taking this direction is that 200,000 people with a dominant version of the meta gene have been dumped into the gene pool. Metas are usually good-looking; there are average-looking metas, but virtually none who're genuinely ugly in a totally mundane way (as opposed to looking like some kind of monster or otherwise grossly deformed as a direct result of their powers). There's a handful of physically disabled metas, but often they have a power that compensates for the disability, and their disabilities are usually not severe enough to prevent them from participating in society. Metas don't get sick much, either, although there's a few with chronic illnesses. Genuinely fat metas are also rare, and even average-sized or mildly overweight metas aren't common.³ (Yes, this applies even if you exclude CamChars. So shut up about that.) There's a higher incidence of genius-level intelligence among metas than norms (even if you exclude the ones where being superintelligent is their power), but it's still relatively rare, just less rare. Above-average intelligence is more common too, but this isn't nearly as universal as the good health and good looks; there have been plenty of stupid PCs, and a handful with average intelligence. There are virtually no metas with actual mental retardation as opposed to garden-variety stupidity, however. Mental illness, on the other hand, is about as common among metas as norms, but there aren't a lot of metas who're unable to function outside of an institution. From a somewhat more OOC perspective, it basically falls into two categories: troubled and/or dysfunctional PCs who can function with some amount of difficulty (conditions like OCD, PTSD, ADHD, depression, mild autism, personality disorders, etc etc etc), and deranged antagonists who tend to be megalomaniacs and/or sociopaths (in the clinical sense) but might have some other psychiatric condition alongside that. ---- ¹From an OOC perspective, all norm and former-norm PCs should be assumed to be carriers unless their authors choose otherwise for dramatic purposes. In the reasonably likely event that they get together with an opposite-sex PC and reproduce, this allows the couple's authors to choose whether their children are metas or norms. Non-carriers' kids would all be norms no matter what (barring genetic tinkering, or their partner being a Space Needle clone/a descendant thereof), in case I didn't make that obvious enough earlier. ²Also because Cammy really, really hates it when there's a massive mismatch between what the PCs are like and what the NPCs are like with no adequate IC explanation. But mostly it's because it's simpler and easier to say that metas in general are like the PCs instead of saying that the PCs are a special case and having to figure out how metas in general differ from them. ³Some PCs eat large amounts of food as a source of energy for their powers, which explains why they can eat comical amounts of food and stay thin. This can't be the sole source of energy for (most) physical powers, though, because they would call for a LOT of energy, way more than you could get by eating even very large meals at semi-normal intervals; therefore they would still have to be at least partially powered by what Cammy has termed "WOOO MAGIC ENERGY". Eating a lot of food just lightens the load on the WOOO MAGIC ENERGY.